If only everything was so simple

I’ve been burning loads of DVDs in my Powerbook recently, copies of films and backups and so on. A few days ago I got this weird error message just as Toast was starting to burn a disk: Sense Key = MEDIUM ERROR Sense Code = 0×73,0×03. I couldn’t make any sense of this so I tried with another blank disk and got the same result. My heart sank; the new box of 25 blank DVDs I had just bought was performing really well until this happened.
So I had a look on the web for a solution. Roxio, who make Toast, have a support forum. The people there all seemed to agree that it was a problem with bad or incompatible disks or that maybe the drive was dying. However, with a bit more googling I found some comments elsewhere that suggested that maybe I should make sure my superdrive’s firmware was up-to-date. So I downloaded a firmware ‘flasher’ from the excellent Cynical. He has unsupported, maybe even illegal firmware for most Powerbook superdrives. After a nerve-wracking flashing process, if it goes wrong your drive could be dead forever, I tried to burn a DVD. Still the same problem.
Depressed and desperate I tried burning a DVD with Apple’s Disk Utility as an experiment. It worked fine and it occurred to me that maybe this was a problem with Toast after all, and not the drive. I deleted all the Toast preferences files I could find, nervously launched Toast again and Hey Presto! everything was working just like new. I’m tempted to say that this all proves what to55er5 Roxio are, but that would probably be unfair.